How everything started

The alpha compressor and how it entered this world

Hardly has there ever been a time as crazy as this one. Constantly being haunted by new ideas for equipment, circuits and functions the heads of a nameless company began to breed the concept for a compressor that should be called alpha one day. Plenty of things were possible, none good enough. One day the actual big bang came all of a sudden. The picture shows the very first sketch of it!

This concept had kept us waiting, but when it came it was surprisingly complete. The alpha compressor contained almost the complete functionality of the then called Fat Max. Only the intended Hold function was not convincing enough and was dropped soon. Apart from that only minor things were changed. Further sleepless nights resulted finally in the company name elysia.

Initial experimental setups and auditions already pointed out that a very special gear was about to be built. Of course it had to get the proper looks, too! The elyisans approached the specialists from markt und design. Thrilled by the idea and the possibility to draw on plentiful material resources the designer team set to work immediately.

The designers made a great job of it and came up with an incredible number of ingenious suggestions. All in all they delivered far more than one hundred detailed layouts. In the end we were completely spoiled for choice as we had to pick one single design from ten fully elaborated proposals. "Blue Shift" finally made the race, and today we're still happy with the decision.

In the meantime the intensive development phase showed its results. We built lots of new circuit variants, checked out complete series of components and listened to the results again and again. Little by little the puzzle made of discrete components began to materialize itself. This picture shows one of the early prototype PCBs (but you can already see the modular construction in three layers).

Finally it was done. The meanwhile renamed alpha compressor saw the light of day. Still slumbering in its simple grey prototype housing it toured to several mastering and recording studios in order to receive well-founded feedback for fine tuning before the first serial production. By the way: the cable chaos in the picture above is history by now.

This is a picture of the final rendering. Several months before the alpha compressor was actually completed, this made it possible to imagine how it would look like in all details later. The data used for it was also the basis for the final construction plans, by the way. Now we had to see if electronics and mechanics could be combined to the final product we had in mind.

It worked. This picture shows the alpha compressor with the serial number 1 that was presented at the Musikmesse in Frankfurt/Main 2006. Quite exactly 1 year after the first sketches of the initial idea the resulting product was finished - a true milestone in the world of analog audio compressors.